Barbara Strank Zivkovich was a native of Franklin Borough (Johnstown), Pennsylvania. Primarily a watercolorist, her expressive compositions celebrated the region’s coal and steel industries from the mid-1940s to around 1980. Naming Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper as her main influences, she developed a personal style marked by freely drawn forms and arbitrary color. In paintings such as Rosedale Coke Plant, Eb. Road, Zivkovich suggests bustling energy through billowing clouds of smoke and endless serpentine trains of coal cars.

Zivkovich studied at Hofstra College and at the Art Students League of New York. Much of her career was spent in her home town, where she was an active member of the Allied Artists of Johnstown. Today her paintings are valuable as documents of a once-important industry that has largely disappeared from western Pennsylvania.